She patted Peter’s arm. “I’ll find you something to snack on. That should help.” Then she turned to face the front of the room. “This child,” she said, deliberately not mentioning his name, “is diabetic. He needs a snack. May I look in the backpacks for something edible?”
The man in charge gestured to his cohort, the one standing in the middle of the room keeping an eye on Claire and the kids. The man strode over to where the backpacks hung and started rifling through them.
Claire’s cell phone vibrated, making a grinding sound against the top of her desk.
“Answer it.”
One of the goons picked up the phone, opened it and held it against the principal’s ear. “This is Principal Allen.” He looked up at the man who gave the orders. “It’s State Representative Reimes.”
The other man finished searching the backpack and abruptly thrust a pack of snack crackers at Claire. Her hand shaking, she reached out and took the small package. “Thank you.”
The man didn’t respond. He stalked back to his position. She quickly opened the crackers and passed the package to Peter. Then she moved down the length of the window and made soothing comments to the rest of her students in hopes of keeping them calm. As she did, she took every opportunity to survey the goings-on beyond the drop-off area.
Were they planning a rescue attempt?
How in the world would they be able to do that? There was no access to the room other than the one door and this one long window. The emergency exit was actually an operational section of window at the southeast corner of the room. The rest of the window was sealed shut. Even if someone managed to open that emergency exit, no more than one or two of the children would be able to escape before the man watching them noticed.
Right now, the best thing to do was to stay cool and not to make any moves that could be considered aggressive or uncooperative.
The leader’s demands drew her full attention back to the front of the room.
“You have just one hour. If the authorities do not release Hamid Kaibar by then, your son will die. Another child will die every half hour after that until Kaibar is released.”
Terror wrapped around Claire’s chest and tightened to the point of making breathing near impossible.
Surely it wouldn’t come to that.
Surely the authorities would comply with their demands.
And release a terrorist? Darlene’s words about Hamid Kaibar reignited in her brain. One on the top ten list?
It was at that precise moment that Claire fully understood the ramifications of their predicament.
Her first assessment had been correct.
They were going to die.
“I want my mommy,” Lila Miles whimpered. Her plea set off a cacophony of similar sentiments.
“Let’s settle down, girls and boys,” Claire urged, desperation taking deep root at this point.
“Miss Grant!”
The brutal tone made Claire flinch as she faced the man in charge.
“Control your students or I will do it for you.”
She knew exactly what that meant.
Turning back to the window lined with children, she shouted, “Quiet, now!”
She moved along the row, touching each student with what she hoped would be a reassuring gesture while urging them to be calm. She promised that all would be fine, that they would be going home soon.
She prayed her promises would not prove to be lies.
“Representative Reimes says that one hour is not enough time.”
Mr. Allen’s voice shook with the impact of the message he had no choice but to relay. Dread twisting into tiny knots in her stomach, Claire waited for a response from the men at the front of the room.
“One hour is all he has,” their captor stated. “That hour started five minutes ago. That is all I have to say.”
Mr. Allen repeated the statement into Claire’s cell phone and the man holding the phone closed it, severing the connection.
Claire worked for several precious moments to maintain her composure as she whispered soothing assurances to the children. Remaining calm was absolutely essential. If there was any hope at all of devising an escape plan, she could not be distracted by panic or fear.
There was no way the authorities were going to release a terrorist, not even to save these children. Claire almost lost hope then and there. The police would try to help. Representative Reimes would call in his every marker, put the pressure on the political chain of command. But she knew all too well what would happen if the powers that be decided to have SWAT converge on the classroom in lieu of releasing the prisoner.
There would be few survivors.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the highly trained members of such an elite force to do the best job possible, but the four gunmen holding her class captive had nothing to lose. If they went down they would want to incur as much collateral damage as possible. Even if tear gas were somehow introduced into the room to disable the terrorists, they would go down firing those automatic weapons. The children were lined up in the window like sitting ducks in a carnival shooting gallery.
They would be the first to die.
She glanced at the clock high on the wall above the white board behind her desk. In forty-five minutes, the man in charge had promised, the first child would be sacrificed if his demand was not met.
She had to figure out a way to stop that from happening.
Her gaze landed on Mr. Allen. There was nothing he could do. He was bound securely with a masked guard towering over him. The leader lingered around the desk as well. Waiting for the call back, she supposed.
The other two men were covering the door and the classroom at large, including her and the children.
Four armed men and all these children.
She had no weapon, no actual training in how to fight off an attacker. Sure she’d taken a self-defense course once. But that course had focused mainly on preventing the possibility of sexual assault. She had no idea how to fend off terrorists.
One thing she did know, however, was how to fire a weapon. She was no expert by any means. She wasn’t even a particularly good shot. But she knew how a rifle worked. All she needed was to get her hands on one and then she’d just shoot until they didn’t move anymore, as her father had always put it.
If he were still alive, her father would be proud of her for attempting to assess her options under the circumstances, but even he would have to admit that her chances of accomplishing anything were sorely limited. Still, she had to try. Giving up was not her style.
She considered the items she had seen in the children’s backpacks when she’d gone through them. The phones had all been turned over as requested. There really hadn’t been anything else she could use as a weapon. Getting into her desk was out of the question.
What could she use as a weapon? Her gaze skimmed the array of projects the children had turned in last week. A miniature volcano. A papier-mâché dinosaur. A Pterosaur complete with nest and hand-painted eggs. The model of the prehistoric bird was fairly large with pointy metal claws about the size of ink pens attached to its feet. The bird was mounted on a stand as if flying over its nest. If she could pretend to knock it off the desk, she could pull one of the claws free as she picked up the mess. Then use it as a weapon, if she got the opportunity. It wouldn’t be much, but it was better than nothing.
Claire checked on her students. They were getting restless. She moved from one to the other and urged them to keep their eyes on the police cars no matter what